John said to Mark:
Perhaps I miss this point because I'm just SO verbally oriented, but when
playing chess or picturing a problem in framing a house, I can see how I'm
using a spatial reasoning that isn't dependent on words but uses abstract
things like shapes and relations. But even here, I'm thinking conceptually at
least. For a relation to exist it must involve discrete "things". And that
has a verbal component, even if I'm just thinking to myself, "that thing over
there". Does that make sense?
dmb says:
Yes, things and thoughts. It's hard to tell the difference. Maybe there isn't
any difference, eh? Try this on for size, gents.
>From "Pragmatism and Humanism", pages 597-8:
What shall we call a THING anyhow? It seems quite arbitrary, for we carve out
everything, just as we carve out constellations, to suit our human purposes.
For me, this whole ‘audience’ is one thing, which grows now restless, now
attentive. I have no use at present for its individual units, so I don’t
consider them. So of an ‘army,’ of a ‘nation.’ But in your own eyes, ladies and
gentlemen, to call you ‘audience’ is an accidental way of taking you. The
permanently real things for you are your individual persons. To an anatomist,
again, those persons are but organisms, and the real things are the organs. Not
the organs, so much as their constituent cells, say the histologists; not the
cells, but their molecules, say in turn the chemists.We break the flux of
sensible reality into things, then, at our will. We create the subjects of our
true as well as of our false propositions.We create the predicates also. Many
of the predicates of things express only the relations of the things to us and
to our feelings. Such predicates of course are human additions. Caesar crossed
the Rubicon, and was a menace to Rome’s freedom. He is also an American
school-room pest, made into one by the reaction of our schoolboys on his
writings. The added predicate is as true of him as the earlier ones.You see how
naturally one comes to the humanistic principle: you can’t weed out the human
contribution. Our nouns and adjectives are all humanized heirlooms, and in the
theories we build them into, the inner order and arrangement is wholly dictated
by human considerations, intellectual consistency being one of them.
Mathematics and logic themselves are fermenting with human rearrangements;
physics, astronomy and biology follow massive cues of preference. We plunge
forward into the field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and
we have made already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines
what we do; what we do again determines what we experience; so from one thing
to another, altho the stubborn fact remains that there IS a sensible flux, what
is true of it seems from first to last to be largely a matter of our own
creation.We build the flux out inevitably. The great question is: does it, with
our additions, rise or fall in value? Are the additions WORTHY or UNWORTHY?
dmb continues:
In Lila, Pirsig quotes the notion that "we are suspended in language" and in
ZAMM he explains that we all inherit a conceptual reality that has evolved over
the ages.
""In our highly complex organic state we advanced organisms respond to our
environment with an invention of many marvelous analogues. We invent earth and
heavens, trees, stones and oceans, gods, music, arts, language, philosophy,
engineering, civilization and science. We call these analogues reality. And
they are reality. We mesmerize our children in the name of truth into knowing
that they are reality. We throw anyone who does not accept these analogues into
an insane asylum. But that which causes us to invent the analogues is Quality.
Quality is the continuing stimulus which our environment puts upon us to create
the world in which we live. All of it. Every last bit of it." (ZAMM, p251)
Isn't James saying the same thing when he says, "We plunge forward into the
field of fresh experience with the beliefs our ancestors and we have made
already; these determine what we notice; what we notice determines what we do;
what we do again determines what we experience"? I think so.
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